Professor Harvey Whitehouse
Teaching and research interests
Socio-cultural evolution, cognitive science of culture, religion and ritual; Papua New Guinea and the Pacific.
After carrying out two years of field research on a ‘cargo cult’ in New Britain , Papua New Guinea in the late eighties, Harvey Whitehouse developed a theory of the role of ritual in group formation that has been the subject of extensive critical evaluation and testing by anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and cognitive scientists. Currently he runs a collaborative project entitled ‘Explaining Religion’, investigating the psychological causes and consequences of religious thinking and behaviour. Funded by the European Commission and currently employing seven postdoctoral researchers in Oxford, this project involves collaboration with researchers at 14 universities across Europe and North America. Whitehouse is also studying religion from an evolutionary perspective with co-investigator David Sloan Wilson (Binghamton University), on a project funded by the Templeton Foundation. This research combines approaches from the cognitive sciences with Darwinian perspectives on religious evolution. Whitehouse is also among a number of Wilson’s collaborators on a related project, funded by the National Science Foundation, exploring the public policy implications of evolutionary approaches to systems of regulation. Although an ethnographer by training and background, Whitehouse has for some years been running psychological experiments investigating various aspects of religious thinking. Together with psychologist Cristine Legare (University of Texas) he is currently developing experiments, funded by the McDonnell Foundation and the Fell Fund, to explore how children acquire and understand ritualized actions. Whitehouse is also interested in the prehistory of religion and makes annual visits to the Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk in Turkey where, in collaboration with archaeologist Ian Hodder (Stanford University) and others, he is seeking to discover how changes in the frequency and emotionality of ritual life relate to the shift from hunting and gathering to farming.
In recent years, Whitehouse has been heavily involved in the creation of new research clusters. He was founding director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University Belfast and of Oxford’s Centre for Anthropology of Mind. In 2006, Whitehouse was elected to a newly created Chair in Social Anthropology at Oxford University and to a Professorial Fellowship at Magdalen College. From 2006-2009 he served as Head of the School of Anthropology.
Due to Whitehouse’s current grant commitments and research leave entitlements, he will not be teaching in 2009-10 or 2010-11 but he continues to supervise research students working in a wide range of field settings, typically combining traditional ethnographic approaches with quantitative and experimental methods.
